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Things That Shouldn't Be Dictionaries
Jul. 1st, 2008 11:47 pmI'm reading about teaching. I read a blog entry where someone was complaining about how stupid it was that they were forced to teach math with group learning and no practice and the kids were all confused. So the writer, who was planning to teach for only three years (as part of the Americorp program, I think), just ignored that and did what would work, but the people who wanted to be career teachers were afraid to disobey like that, so they just struggled along.
So I looked up the math textbooks in use for my local school district and found them in the library and thumbed through one.
It didn't have that problem, but it did have the same problem as the sociology text my students had when I was student teaching. Sociology is one of the most fascinating fields ever, though we don't yet know much. But there was almost no hint of that in the text. It was just a pile of terms and their definitions. The whole time I was teaching I was able to stomach using the text only once. For all the other lessons, I went back to materials that had made me think the topic was interesting and figured out a way to modify those for high school use. I slept only four hours on weeknights.
But hey, math textbooks are better, right? At the very least, they have a lot of problems in them, and all you have to do is make sure they are all solvable and that the answers in the back are all correct (because all texts are full of typos, right?).
Well, can you believe you can design a math book to be nothing but a pile of terms and their definitions? I looked closely at a unit on angles. Do they talk about the fascinating problem of measuring an angle? (Finding some sort of length to measure just doesn't work. You can't just use two points like you're used to, but you can use three points, so long as those equate to the right parts of a circle. Who would ever guess that?) Do they talk about how all triangles, no matter how ordinary or how wacky, have angles whose measures add up to the same number? No, it's all about what are complimentary angles and supplementary angles (I had actually forgotten those terms) and right angles, acute angles, scalene triangles. Bleh. It was hard for me to even remember that there was anything interesting about angles after looking at that chapter.
No sleep would be had trying to teach from that book.
So I looked up the math textbooks in use for my local school district and found them in the library and thumbed through one.
It didn't have that problem, but it did have the same problem as the sociology text my students had when I was student teaching. Sociology is one of the most fascinating fields ever, though we don't yet know much. But there was almost no hint of that in the text. It was just a pile of terms and their definitions. The whole time I was teaching I was able to stomach using the text only once. For all the other lessons, I went back to materials that had made me think the topic was interesting and figured out a way to modify those for high school use. I slept only four hours on weeknights.
But hey, math textbooks are better, right? At the very least, they have a lot of problems in them, and all you have to do is make sure they are all solvable and that the answers in the back are all correct (because all texts are full of typos, right?).
Well, can you believe you can design a math book to be nothing but a pile of terms and their definitions? I looked closely at a unit on angles. Do they talk about the fascinating problem of measuring an angle? (Finding some sort of length to measure just doesn't work. You can't just use two points like you're used to, but you can use three points, so long as those equate to the right parts of a circle. Who would ever guess that?) Do they talk about how all triangles, no matter how ordinary or how wacky, have angles whose measures add up to the same number? No, it's all about what are complimentary angles and supplementary angles (I had actually forgotten those terms) and right angles, acute angles, scalene triangles. Bleh. It was hard for me to even remember that there was anything interesting about angles after looking at that chapter.
No sleep would be had trying to teach from that book.